Ex-Gunbunny hops home for Arkansas Summer

Summer isn't too far down the road, but there's this nonmeteorological Summer that started about five years ago in Woodstock, N.Y., in an Airstream trailer that once belonged to Uma Thurman.

Arkansas Summer is the name of Chris Maxwell's debut solo album and it is a very fine thing. He's playing an After Hours show at South on Main in Little Rock on Friday. The Libras will open.

Maxwell, you say? Yes, Chris Maxwell, former guitarist and songwriter for The Gunbunnies. Remember them? Little Rock band that signed with Virgin Records and released the excellent Paw-Paw Patch in 1990 before disbanding a year or so later? Chris Maxwell, who moved to New York not long after and joined the band Skeleton Key? Who now lives in Woodstock with his wife, Kelly, and their 8-year-old son? Same guy who now produces music with his partner, Philip Hernandez? Yeah. Those two have worked with Jon Spencer, Yoko Ono, They Might Be Giants, and they've done soundtrack work for television programs like Bob's Burgers and Inside Amy Schumer.

So, about five years ago Maxwell, 51, who grew up in southwest Little Rock and is a member of McClellan High School's Class of '82, started working in his free time on the songs that would eventually land on Arkansas Summer, recording in the Airstream he got from Thurman after her divorce from Ethan Hawke. Story goes, Maxwell says, it's where Hawke did much of his writing (screenplays, novels) when he wasn't working as an actor. And it's where Maxwell did much of his recording.

"I wasn't trying to make a record," Maxwell says. It's a late afternoon on the East Coast and he's being driven by Kelly from their Woodstock home to a gig in New York at a place called the HiFi, which was once called Brownie's and is where he often played with the beloved Skeleton Key. "Some of the songs go back quite a ways, but I wasn't thinking this was going to be a solo record. It wasn't until three or four years ago that it started to seem like something."

What it seemed like, and what it became, was a record of gritty Southern poetry set to music that evokes the best of bands like Big Star, Elliot Smith and the rootsier rock of Maxwell's home state. The album, which is being released on Little Rock label Max Recordings, deftly avoids cliches and instead reaches deep into something much more honest and moving.

"It's not really a concept record, but the thing that started making it bind together were these stories about my family -- my mother, my father, my stepfather, my brother -- all these things started sticking together and that's what inspired me. But it's not just about my family, it's about my own personal journey from Little Rock to New York to Woodstock."

The album's tremendous and moving title cut -- sample lyric: "When the drum becomes the drummer/She beats down like an Arkansas summer" -- deals with some of the darker moments of his youth, he says, while the track "Away We Go" is a document of sorts on The Gleaners, one of his former bands. Other highlights include the haunting opening track, "Strange Shadows," "Have You Ever Killed Yourself" and the clever, folky "Drunk Barber Shaved the World."

John Burdick in Almanac Weekly calls the album "masterful Baroque Americana."

Joining Maxwell on Friday will be another former 'bunny, guitarist David Jukes. "It's been probably 25 years since we've played together. Crazy!" He says Jukes will likely sing a Gunbunnies song or two.

And as for that Airstream with the famous lineage? Maxwell sold it and built a proper studio.

Weekend on 03/24/2016